Indian solo traveller Balram Menon shares the thrilling experience of dog sledding on a frozen lake in Mongolia.

A pack of Siberian Huskies stood waiting, tethered to the sled. After a brief instruction from the musher, Balram Menon was set to go on the experience of his lifetime. He climbed on to the sled, mumbled a few commands in Mongolian to the dogs and off they leapt down Terelji lake, which had frozen into a blinding expanse of white.

It was -20 degrees at the Gorkhi Terelji National Park, 140 kilometres from the world’s coldest capital, Ulaanbaatar. He speaks of a silence so perfect it seemed eternal and the bluest of skies he has ever seen (Mongolia has 260 days of blue skies a year, on an average).

The 35-kilometre journey on the sled, pulled by eight huskies, included a stop for lunch. “It was barbecue with a camp fire. The locals usually just cut a hole through the ice on the lake and catch fish.”

An instrumentation engineer from Kanjiramattom, near Kochi, Menon is an intrepid traveller in the true sense of the term. “I came across an article on dog sledding and found that it is done in Finland, some parts of Alaska, Norway and in Mongolia. I found that only five Indians had travelled to Mongolia in 2016-2017. So I zeroed in on Mongolia and it was an adventure right from the start.”

There are no direct flights from India to Mongolia. Menon took the shortest route geographically from Kochi to Ulaanbaatar via Colombo-Bangkok-Beijing. The 18-hour flight was stretched to 28 hours on return, including a long layover at Beijing. He could have taken the Trans-Siberian railway through Russia and China, which is known for its picturesque route, but skipped it, as it would have consumed more time. “No travel operator does trips to Mongolia, especially in winter. Anyway, I don’t go through them; the thrill of travelling includes planning and doing it all myself,” he says. Menon spent close to a year researching Mongolia.

The six-day backpacking trip included visits to the Khustai National Park, famous for its flora and fauna, in the Tuv Province, the Tsojin Boldog where the tallest equestrian statue (40-metre-tall) of Chinggis Khan is located, a 13th-Century museum and some Shamanist temples. Menon also managed to pack in snow paragliding. “It felt like flying above sheets of white.”  (The Hindu)